Ushered in by Vanguard's legendary founder Jack Bogle, low-fee
investing in indices and exchange traded funds (ETFs) has been
booming, with Americans moving more
than $1 trillion from actively managed funds to passive
funds in the past decade.

Stock pickers are actually having a pretty
decent year in 2017 — which, for their standards, means a
little more than half of them are beating their benchmark.

But research released earlier this year
from Standard & Poor's shows just how bad the bloodbath
has been for active managers once you strip away survivorship
bias — that is, accounting for funds that have merged or
liquidated — and you look at multi-year time horizons.

One-year returns vary, but the performance is more consistent
once you compare funds to the benchmarks over the course of 10 or
15 years. Less than 8% of all large-cap, mid-cap, and small-cap
equity funds outperform over the course of 15 years.

When you look at all domestic funds — including the comparatively
better-performing value funds and real estate funds — against the
S&P 1500 index, the vast majority (82%) still
underperform over the long haul.

S&P

It's worth noting that these figures take fees into account. More
funds may actually beat the indices in the raw performance, but
once you account for the myriad fees they charge, the gains are
wiped out.

"This is probably the biggest thing that's affecting
people's portfolios over a long period of time," Michael Solari,
a certified financial planner with Solari Financial Management,
told Business Insider
earlier this year.

"A lot of people don't really understand what the impact of
maybe a half a percent is on their retirement," Solari said.
"It's pretty shocking when you take a look at it over
time."